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Definition from de UD website

Various languages have various means to express politeness or respect; some of the means are morphological. Three to four dimensions of politeness are distinguished in linguistic literature. The Polite feature currently covers (and mixes) two of them; a more elaborate system of feature values may be devised in future versions of UD if needed. The two axes covered are:

speaker-referent axis (meant to include the addressee when he happens to be the referent) speaker-addressee axis (word forms depend on who is the addressee, although the addressee is not referred to) Changing pronouns and/or person and/or number of the verb forms when respectable persons are addressed in Indo-European languages belongs to the speaker-referent axis because the honorific pronouns are used to refer to the addressee.

In Czech, formal second person has the same form for singular and plural, and is identical to informal second person plural. This involves both the pronoun and the finite verb but not a participle, which has no special formal form (that is, formal singular is identical to informal singular, not to informal plural).

In German, Spanish or Hindi, both number and person are changed (informal third person is used as formal second person) and in addition, special pronouns are used that only occur in the formal register ([de] Sie; [es] usted, ustedes; [hi] आप āpa).

In Japanese, verbs and other words have polite and informal forms but the polite forms are not referring to the addressee (they are not in second person). They are just used because of who the addressee is, even if the topic does not involve the addressee at all. This kind of polite language is called teineigo (丁寧語) and belongs to the speaker-addressee axis. Nevertheless, we currently use the same values for both axes, i.e. Polite=Form can be used for teineigo too. This approach may be refined in future.

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